Web Business Resource

by William King

Recently there has been an influx of fraudulent wholesalers and dubious bulk discount stores on the net. This article concentrates on how to detect such companies and what necessary checks must be carried out before investing in any business venture.

To detect whether the wholesaler or the company, being dealt with is genuine or not, these checks must be considered.

- A professionally designed website with a good layout is not an indicator that the business is genuine. A lot of wholesalers do not have great looking sites but are registered and authentic businesses. Never EVER get convinced by the design of the site.

- Ensure that the wholesaler accepts payments via credit/debit cards and other online payment methods like paypal, nochex etc. If the company ask you to wire (BACS) money directly into their account then avoid trading with them as most definitely they are scamming you. Card payments in most cases can be easily traced and charged back whereas with money transfers, once the funds have left your account, they are gone forever.

- Try to talk to a representative of the company on the phone, it is always nice to talk to someone and clear your doubts.

- Visit their contact page and look for their contact/postal address. Try to determine whether it is a physical postal address or just a mailbox. If it’s a mailbox, find out why the wholesaler doesn’t have a proper postal address and where do they actually trade from?

- Request to visit their warehouse or trading office, even if there is no specific intention of doing so. Any fraudulent company would be hesitant to let you visit their premises.

- Visit the Companies Database provided by governmental bodies such as the one in UK: www.companieshouse.gov.uk and use their search index to determine whether the company is registered with them or not. Sole traders do not have to register and as result this would only serve as a secondary check but none the less will definitely help to clear any doubts.

Performing these checks will most definitely help to differentiate a scam company from legitimate wholesalers. After all any business venture involves a number of risks and seeking professional help is always a better option than making decisions based instincts and feelings. For the creator of scams, only one thing can be said: Fraud in the end secures for its companions only repentance and shame.

© 2006, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.

by Scott Hughes

Unfortunately, one of the realities of internet business is the scam, schemes gimmicks, and cons. Of course, scams, schemes, and such have been around long before the internet, but just like the internet has increased and facilitated genuine business, the internet has also helped black-hat confidence men spread their dirty scams and schemes.

Most of the schemes fall under the categories of ponzi, pyramid, or MLM (multi-level-marketing). A ponzi scheme is a scheme in which “members” join by paying a fee, told that they will receive an income without working, but the income is paid by giving them a portion of other members fees. Many people are familiar with a pyramid scheme or MLM. Both are flawed business models, in which “sponsors” are paid commissions off the sales of other people they recruit into the scheme, both directly and indirectly. Most pyramid schemes and MLM don’t even really sell a product; Instead they just sell “start-up” packages. The inherent flaw of the pyramid scheme is that it continuously needs exponentially more sellers to sponsor. Eventually, the pyramid collapses, leaving all but the few con men at the top broke.

One thing I always recommend against is using any program that claims you can make easy money online fast with a small fee. There’s a lot of scams out there that say you can make money taking surveys, entering data, stuffing envelopes, or etc. They don’t work. They’re just scams and schemes. Basically, if it sounds to good to be true, it is. If you’ll make so much money with these programs, why do they need the small fee beforehand? Couldn’t they just take the fee out of your pay? They can’t take the fee out of your pay, because you’re never going to get any.

Remember, the only free lunch is found in a mouse trap.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web Business Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Scott Hughes

Online businesses vary in almost every way possible - from who they serve to how they make revenue. However, one basic similarity connects all internet businesses: websites. If you don’t have a website, you’re not doing business on the internet. An online entrepreneur must choose between designing a website himself or herself, or hiring a professional web designer.

Studying the latter option first, professional web designers vary in many aspects, most notably style, ability, size, experience and price. If you plan on hiring a professional web designer, you want to ask the designer for examples of his or her work and for references. You don’t want to just review the web designers past work without also consulting references, because no matter how good, stylish, or well-coded the designer’s work is, how do you know the websites were made according to the directions of the customers? You also want to consult more than one designer, so that you can compare and contrast the work of different designers. By researching the references and past work of designers, you’ll know their respective abilities, styles, and experiences. Never just take a designers word that he/she works “very well” and has “a lot of experience”.

Once you’ve researched some designers’ styles, abilities, and experience, there are two other important things to check: price and size. For price, more may actually be better. Your website’s appearance and functionality will determine the success of your online business. Saving a few bucks on web design often will cost you in the long run, perhaps terminally. So, when choosing a web designer, avoid cheapness. However, size works the opposite, less is better. You want a unique, customized site that’s built & designed according to your directions. A large impersonal designer-company mass-produces generic websites, and isn’t interested in meeting the special needs of individual single-sales. Going to a large web design company for a quality site is like going to McDonalds for a quality hamburger. All you’ll get is a generic flavor-less product.

An expensive professional designer is needed to outsource, so I recommend that online entrepreneurs build and design their own websites. Even if you know nothing about designing websites, it’s probably better to learn to design websites rather than outsource the design of your website. An entrepreneur’s time is very valuable, but, in the long run, the cost of learning is lower than the cost of outsourcing. By building and designing your own website yourself, you can change, update, and add to your website anytime without rehiring a web designer. Wise people say that it’s better to teach a man to fish, than give him a fish. Well similarly, it is better to teach yourself to fish, than to buy a fish… especially when fish are websites.

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web Business Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Gregg Hall

One of the factors that many people forget about when they are looking for a web host is email. The types of accounts offered along with sizes and limitations are as varied as the web hosting companies are themselves.

Every web host should provide you with the ability to have several email accounts, most will offer up to 10 with a basic low end account. Another feature to look for is a company that offers an account that will accept and hold any email sent to your domain that does not match an email address. This is due to the fact that many people misspell names and such and therefore emails get lost.

You basically have three different email services available to you. The first is probably the one that most are familiar with, the POP or post office protocol works like a normal inbox such as your Outlook Express. You will be given a certain amount of storage space you are allowed but generally can only access from one computer.

The second choice called IMAP or internet message access protocol will allow you to use your email account on many different computers so that you can access it at work and home.

The third choice you have is a web based email which is of course the most flexible, allowing you to access your email from anywhere on the planet with a computer and an internet connection though a web browser. I like having all the options.

The next consideration that you have is on the size limit of storage you have. Nearly every web hosting company will have some sort of restriction on the size of account you can have as well as on the size of messages that can be sent. This is especially crucial if you are using your email to send pictures or documents. One key thing you want to do if you are using outlook or outlook express is to select the notify option for when your email is opened so that you know it was received. Many times if a file is too large you will have no other way of knowing. If you don’t get the notification then you know they didn’t receive your message.

Now, back to actual storage space, you should pick a web host company that offers a reasonable balance between the bandwidth limits and the size of the mailbox storage. For example if you have an account that offers 500MB of bandwidth but only a 3 MB data storage for email accounts.

Another important issue to look for is outgoing email limits. If you are using your account for business you may need to send emails out to a large number of people several times a day, if the system automatically flags that as spam you will not be able to send them. Check the limitations on outgoing mail and be sure it suits your needs.

by Rob Stokes

The recent buzz around WebPR, Optimised Press Releases, Online Reputation Management, and Blogging etc. is causing quite a stir. It seems there is a whole new lexicon emerging and many are struggling to keep up with the eMarketing geeks and their fancy new terminology. However, the bottom line is that the fundamentals of good PR still apply - it’s only the medium and methodology that are changing. So, with my broadband connection inserted intravenously, I am going to attempt to give you the low-down of what it’s all about.

WebPR should be split into two different tracks: ‘listening’ and ‘talking’. While both require independent skills and tactics, they are still inherently tied together - a bit like bangers and mash.

First the Listening…

Given the harsh reality that your customers probably don’t care about you, let’s begin with what I consider the more important side of the equation: the ‘listening’. On a basic level, this involves monitoring the Internet for conversations about your brand and even your competitors’ brands. Tracking blogs, websites, chatrooms and wikis via tools such as Technorati, Pubsub and Google Alerts can deliver this info directly into your email inbox or RSS feed reader (…if you don’t know what an RSS feed reader is, stop reading, slap yourself, and go and find out!).

With a collection of information-seeking robots at your disposal, it is relatively easy to keep your finger on the pulse of what is being said. The skill is in distilling this information into something you can use so that you can devise strategies to manipulate the conversation to go in the direction you want it to. While it’s impossible to ‘control the conversation’, being a part of it, and influencing it, is critical for the survival for any brand in today’s hyper-connected world.

Then the Talking…

Now for the other side of WebPR: the ‘talking’. Outgoing communications can take a huge variety of forms online. One such method, online press releases, should deliver value to the reader since as mentioned before; people don’t care about your brand. If you’ve just opened a new office in Timbuktu, people don’t give a damn, but they do care about things that help them - so valuable enriching content is a must. Secondly, online press releases should drive traffic to your site (your website is not a fancy brochure - it is a marketing tool that needs visitors to become customers). To achieve this, press releases need to be search engine optimised to contain related key phrases and links.

Tying in with online press releases is the writing of feature articles which offer the opportunity to jump even further onto the value bandwagon, allowing you to become the dominant opinion leader in your industry. For example, if you sell holidays to Cape Town, your online marketing efforts will greatly benefit if your target market considers you a leader in this field. This is where ‘value-content’ comes in. Articles containing information for the potential traveller, such as “The Top 10 things to remember when travelling to Cape Town” are value-adding - people love this stuff! The valuable nature of this content means it attracts links naturally - the Valhalla of SEO. It should also contain an understated mention of your brand. And, if published on a third party site, should carry a link back to your own website. This drives site visitors who are automatically predisposed to your brand, and therefore are more likely to engage and buy your product.

Another critical aspect of the talking side of WebPR is your voice in the blogosphere. This can take on many forms. For example, your company should have a ‘blog’ and your staff should be encouraged to blog. But, perhaps more importantly is listening to other bloggers - what they say about your brand and then commenting and responding where appropriate. There have been numerous examples of brands cut to shreds by ignoring the blogosphere. Kryptonite springs to mind and the once mighty Dell is undergoing a serious beating.

On the other side of the coin are brands that have embraced rather than shunned the blogosphere, and they have grown leaps and bounds as a result. South Africa’s own Stormhoek Wine is a perfect example of this. They practically launched themselves using blogs and, after chatting to their marketing team, it is obvious that this campaign has become the stuff of legends despite a meagre budget.

Balance is Key

The key to effective WebPR is balancing the two sides: ‘listening’ and ‘talking’. Too much talking and you become an out-of-touch loudmouth; too much listening and the conversation can go in the wrong direction. Once you have found the balance, it’s like finding ‘Zen’ for your brand. Now, like never before, the opportunity to pay intimate attention to the market, and participate in a conversation that drives perception and ultimately purchases - is outstanding. Don’t bury your head in the sand on this one.

Quirk is an Internet marketing company that provides innovative & cost-effective eMarketing services to the global business community. In addition to WebPR and Search Engine Marketing their knowledge of Web Development, Email, Viral & Affiliate Marketing allow them to offer businesses a complete Internet marketing solution.

By Rob Stokes

by Kevin Stith

A logo is the graphic element of a trademark or brand, which is set in a special typeface or arranged in a particular, but legible, way. The shape, color and typeface of a logo have to be different from others in a similar market.

A logo is a tangible reflection of an organization’s personality. In recent times, the term ‘logo’ has been used to describe emblems, signs, symbols and even flags. It has to be unique to avoid confusion in the marketplace among clients, suppliers, users, affiliates, and the general public. One of the most effective ways of protecting it is through registering your logo as a trademark, so that no unauthorized third parties can use it, or interfere with the owner’s use of it.

While large corporations spend thousands of dollars to update and implement their logos, many small businesses will turn to local graphic designers to do a corporate logo. These days there is a lot of software available on the market which can help you create your own logo. You can also download basic graphics from different sites. You can choose the design template of your choice and create your own free logo design. The process requires you to download and install logo design software. You then need to choose a logo template, add new logo objects, customize colors and designs, adjust the overall logo and print your new logo at no cost.

Remember that a good logo is unique and is not similar to any other company’s. It has to be functional and should look good on a business card and on products. An attractive logo creates a unique identity for a company, and a little research and effort can help you develop a beautiful logo at the lowest possible cost.

By Mary Ann Carolyn Dalangin-Tordecilla

Establishing trust with your customers online is a process that needs to take root. You have to have a lot of patience for trust to build over time. The value of trust is priceless, thus the technique for winning your customers’ heart depends on your ability to know more about them.

I know that building your customer’s trust online touches a very personal matter and doing things via the Internet may seem very impossible. First, you are dealing with a total stranger from looks to character. And second, online customers tend to be there when they only sought their interest online.

So, how could you possibly get their attention and win their trust in this very impersonal environment? What I think on this is that there are no end hallways on this kind of problem. Impossibility seems to vanish in the online environment where solutions are just all over the Internet’s pages. Below are pieces of advice that are very handy in the online work place:

The “look” that launches a million bucks!

One of the standards for success is getting your customers coming back. And this is achieved by winning your customer’s trust. Therefore, trust and loyalty are the key ingredients to a winning slate in your online business.

The very first thing you have to do to make success happen is to have a site that is presentable. A very polished site means it has to be in accordance to the online users. A user-friendly and comfortable site is the very first thing that has to take into account. Remember that the right “look” for a site is not only defined by the latest software found in the web, but also, it carries proper details that help in the site’s usability and comfort.

Content counts, not more, but a lot.

Web contents are the foremost thing that visitors’ came for. They visit your site to find something of importance. And because of this, you have to keep a very updated and relevant content site to catch the attention of your visitors.

Now the answer to getting your visitors trusting your contents, you have to make a site that is very much sought after. To do this, know your visitors well. You have to base your site’s contents to the needs and wants of your visitors. This will make your site addictive than ever. You need to continually establish concern to your visitors. This will have to include not only important contents, but also information that are currently updated. If all contents are outdated, it automatically signals a dead site. In context, an outdated site has nothing new to offer. Remember that online, you have to keep up with the changes. There are plenty of rooms for competitors, and you do not want things in your business going down.

Security measures equals trust.

Effective security measures builds customers trust in return. This indicates that the site is after the welfare of its customers. The seals of approval, like VeriSign and Visa, have all the effective security measures. The more secured a site is, the higher the customer’s trust will be.

A dedicated site garners all priceless rewards.

The virtue of patience is always needed in the business industry. There are many good things that patience brings and it is always for the success of the company.

Trust is the result of patience. Whether you have already established trust in your online business, you still need to use your patience in the growing number of your “trusting” and loyal customers. Expect tons and tons of mails from these visitors after you have built a credible site, where contents are updated. Never ignore your customers. Instead make them feel that they are right in trusting your site. Make them feel well entertained. By helping and treating them right, you gain a relationship that will last for a long time. Trust is a good investment in business. There is no amount to buy this, so better value your customers’ trust as you value success in your business.

http://onlinepr.gbwatch.com gives updates on the ins and outs of public relations and marketing within the Internet. It helps various companies of all sizes to become competitive entrepreneurs, and to focus on building good publicity, promotion and higher sales. It aims to teach businessmen to be witty, confident, and strategic in whichever industry they hope to build their dreams upon. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Ann_Carolyn_Dalangin-Tordecilla

You can’t buy quality traffic.
by Scott Hughes

Anyone even slightly involved in the web promotion industry has heard of these traffic packages - basically, you pay a company X amount of money and they send Y amount of visitors to your site. These packages don’t work, unless your goal is to get ripped off. Web promotion just isn’t something that can effectively be outsourced, because of the unverifiability of the quality of the hits received.

These “traffic-generation” and “promotion-package” businesses don’t specialize in hit quality. These businesses specialize in creating the appearance of promotion and targeted traffic. These companies are professionals at making it look like they’ve sent you loads of targeted traffic on paper, and that’s all. You can’t blame these businesses. They’re interested in making sales for themselves. They don’t care about the success of your business. They don’t care about the success of your website.

You, in contrast, who are interested in the reputation and success of your business can produce quality traffic. With the right methods and effort, you can successfully promote your website or internet business without using black-hat methods or rip-off traffic generators.

Let me shortly outline a few methods:

Networking:

Business networking has been around long before the internet, but the advent of the internet has incalculably multiplied not only the power of networking, but also the ability of small business-people to network. Nowadays, an online business-person can sit-down at home in their pajamas and instantly network with like-minded business-people or clients from the other side of the earth. Networking can lead to great self-promotion, both direct and indirect. For example, a DVD salesman might tell someone in his/her network about a DVD sale on the new X-men movie; then that person may tell his X-Men fan club, which could lead to a large increase in sales of that DVD. Many websites exist to facilitate networking, such as MySpace, Ryze, and DirectMatches.

Article Submission:

Despite its effectiveness, many webmasters and internet business-people don’t know about this method. It’s simple really: just write a short article, around a few hundred words. Insert keywords relating to your business. Add a footer or resource box with a sentence or two of information about you and/or your business with links. Also, in the resource box, write that you give permission for the article to be reprinted so long as the resource box and links stay included and intact. (Look at the bottom of this article for an example.) You can then publish your article, by placing it on your website and/or submitting it to article-directories.

Search Engine Traffic:

Probably the most effective self-generation of web traffic is search engines. If your site is ranked highly on search engines for the relevant keywords, then your customers will find you. Search engines look for content-rich websites with a focused subject. Also, search engines rank websites by the number of websites that link to them, called link popularity. Increasing the rank of your site on search engines is called search engine optimization (or SEO).

Use methods such as these to self-generate traffic and promotion for your website, rather then getting ripped off by offers for “traffic-packages”, “hit-generators”, et cetera.

For more information on web promotion, view the web promotion category at WebBizResource.com here: http://webbizresource.com/?cat=5

About The Author: Scott Hughes creates and runs many successful e-businesses. Read more articles like this on his Web-Resource blog at http://www.webbizresource.com/. You may republish this article if you keep all links intact and keep this “About The Author” footer.

by Jeff Baas

There’s a story to every success online. As a matter of fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that having a story is essential to success. Huh? Let me explain.

I spent a few years trying to break into professional screenwriting. I never made a living at it, but I developed a keen sense of story that gave me enough of a reputation that a number of screenwriting contests asked me to serve as a judge.

For each competition I judged, I read a lot of scripts. Many were terrible. And the terrible ones usually had one thing in common: they had no story.

The main characters started out in situations they clearly didn’t like. They moped, they griped, they suffered a lot of hard luck. Then, in the last couple of pages, whatever trouble they had simply vanished and all their dreams were fulfilled.

What made these screenplays lacking in story value was that the main characters never took action to change their situation. They never grew. They never tried new things. They just plunked themselves down and waited for the world to miraculously change to suit their desires.

Many who start their own business take the same approach. They make a slight start, getting the beginning elements of a business in place.

Then they wait.

They wait, expecting that it’s now up to the world to fulfill their dreams.

They lack a story to their lives.

A story is about overcoming obstacles. A story is about stretching yourself. A story is about exploring beyond the limited confines of who you now are and discovering who you can be.

Would Star Wars have been a story if Luke had decided to go off and hide until things changed to suit him? Of course not. A good story forces its main character to explore and grow.

That’s the kind of story that grabs hold of us. And it’s the kind of story that takes place in setting up every successful business.

What was lacking in those failed screenplays is what is lacking in so many failed businesses: the person’s willingness to risk, to explore, to grow.

If there’s no story in the development of your business - no risk, no discovery, no growth that you undergo - there will be no success. It’s that simple.

To succeed in online business, you must grow as much as, if not more than, your business grows. You must become something more than you now are. Step out into the unknown and run your business in a way that makes it - and you - a good story.

Keywords: internet marketing, starting online small business, success story

About the Author
Jeff Baas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
More Details about starting small business online here. Jeff Baas is a long-time student of the steps to success required in a wide variety of disciplines. He’s found the same principles lead to success in virtually every field, and failure comes when people try to skip around them. See these principles applied to Internet marketing in the Seven Steps to Starting a Small Business Online in the articles, product reviews and free marketing strategies newsletter at http://www.onestopwebsupport.com

By Oluwafisayo Akinlolu

This little secret brought me over 1000+ highly targeted new traffic with less than 60 minutes of my time invested in it.

Now, this is not like the traffic you get from pay-per clicks which dies off as soon as you stop paying.

This little technique of mine actually produces traffic that just won’t stop coming. The first time I tried it, I thought it was just a fluke. I tried it again and traffic went higher.

Then just to be sure - I did nothing for about 30 days and guess what.. the traffic did not drop. Infact the page rank of the sites I used this technique for went up.

So, the technique works and it is very simple.

All you need to do is write good articles. Forget about writing an “encyclopaedia” - short articles of 100 to 500 words related to what you do will work just fine.

Even if you cannot write articles or you consider it too much work, you’ll get thousands of very good writers who are ready to give you high quality articles. Try freelancewriting.com, elance.com …

Next, find keywords that are highly targeted to your websites and products and insert them intelligently into your article to create a flow of content. This makes your article an SEO (Search Engine Optimised) article. The object is to make your articles come up each time these topics are searched for online.

When you have done this, it is time to begin to submit your articles all over the web.

There are websites that will allow you to submit your articles for free. Also, there are sites and softwares that will submit your articles for you. Personally, I submit my articles myself and here’s how I do it.

I search for “article submission websites” in search engines and I sniff through these sites. I basically go for websites that have a page-rank of 4 or higher (Note That). Sometimes, I post in places where the page rank is less BUT I usually stick with a page rank of 4 or more.

Some of the ones I particularly like are searchwarp.com, ideamarketers.com, ezinearticles.com

I then submit my articles to all these places.

To cover all grounds, I usually want to know what’s happening to my articles, so I go to http://google.com/alert and set up an alert that covers the web and ask for a daily report.

All these usually takes me less than 30 minutes and then I sit back to watch what happens next.

The result is usually a stampede of traffic that floods to my websites starting not more than 24 hours after I have posted those articles.

(c) Oluwafisayo Akinlolu, 2006.

I have good news and I have better news. The good news is that Tiffany Sutton has written an entire e-book on working from home. The even better news is that she released it for free on her website, TheWorkPlaceSucks.com. Read an excerpt below:

Business Cards

Because I have a few websites, I have always purchased business cards for each of them. And, I leave those cards in places where people will find them. We leave them with a tip in restaurants, my dry cleaner lets me leave some by their register, and I leave 1 or 2 at the ATM. I leave them on newspaper bins and in the donut shop when we got out for donuts in the morning. (Most of the people in those donut shops are going to a job they wish they didn’t have.)

Leave your cards in a place where people will find them! I leave one every time I fill up my vehicle. The next person who fills up can read my business card instead of focusing on how they are getting ripped off at the pump. I’ve been doing this for several years and it works.

I don’t have kids. So, I pay a friend’s kids to distribute my cards for me. They would much rather walk around their neighborhood than do chores. (And, I pay them pretty well.) For your business cards, I recommend using VistaPrint. They have some cool, eye catching designs and are very reasonably priced.

I have a site that sells dental plans. I keep business cards in the offices of dentists who accept the plans. I am paying for their advertising via my website and the plans I offer make dental services more affordable for their patients. I get paid each time someone goes to my site and signs up for a dental plan. It’s a win/win for both of us. Putting your cards where people will find them and pick them up is everything.

-Tiffany Sutton, TheWorkPlaceSucks.com